Private Health Insurance Status and Utilisation of Dental Services in Australia

This article focuses on the relationship between private insurance status and dental service utilisation in Australia using data between 1995 and 2001. This article employs joint maximum likelihood to estimate models of time since last dental visit treating private ancillary health insurance (PAHI) as endogenous. The sensitivity of results to the choice between two different but related types of instrumental variables is examined. We find robust evidence in both 1995 and 2001 that individuals with a PAHI policy make significantly more frequent dental consultations relative to those without such coverage. A comparison of the 1995 and 2001 results, however, suggests that there has been an increasing role of PAHI in terms of the frequency of dental consultations over time. This seems intuitive given the trends in the price of unsubsidised private dental consultations. In terms of policy, our results suggest that while government measures to increase private health insurance coverage in Australia have been successful to a significant degree, that success may have come at some cost in terms of socio-economic inequality as the privately insured are provided much better access to care and financial protection.

An effective deferentially private data releasing algorithm for decision tree

Differential privacy is a strong definition for protecting individual privacy in data releasing and mining. However, it is a rigid definition introducing a large amount of noise to the original dataset, which significantly decreases the quality of data mining results. Recently, how to design a suitable data releasing algorithm for data mining purpose is a hot research area. In this paper, we propose a differential private data releasing algorithm for decision tree construction. The proposed algorithm provides a non-interactive data releasing method through which miner can obtain the complete dataset for data mining purpose. With a given privacy budget, the proposed algorithm generalizes the original dataset, and then specializes it in a differential privacy constrain to construct decision trees. As the designed novel scheme selection operation can fully utilize the allocated privacy budget, the data set released by the proposed algorithm can yield better decision tree models than other method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods for private decision tree construction.

Quality assessment in private practice : the clinician as service provider

Assessment of quality in the private practice setting may be difficult. The author has taken the view that service delivery is a key outcome of private clinician practice. A method of assessing service delivery in a private consultant physician practice setting is described.